This rocket wants to put your Tweets in space - CNET

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As fascinating as space is, it's a sad fact that most of the humans alive today will simply never get to experience it for themselves. In recent years, however, we've seen a movement towards getting at least some aspect of a human to space -- a time capsule to the stars, a more personal version of the Voyager Golden Record.

Now a team of scientists from the University of Califoia, Santa Barbara want to send your tweets, DNA, photographs and stories to space on a revolutionary wafer-like spacecraft. The project is called Voices of Humanity, and it's currently seeking funding on Kickstarter, where your pledge will land you a spot on the chip going into space.

The team is professor Philip Lubin and engineering physics student Travis Brashears. You might recognise their names from research published in September last year, where they used lasers to direct the trajectory of a piece of basalt, demonstrating the feasibility of using the technology to propel rocks away from the Earth.

Voices of Humanity is the next step of this research. The long-term end goal is a small, wafer-like spacecraft that is propelled through space using directed energy, such as photons, at relativistic speed -- or speed that approaches the speed of light. This project, backed by NASA, will hopefully push humanity towards interstellar exploration.

But first, Lubin and Brashears have to demonstrate that the wafer spacecraft is feasible. By creating the Voices of Humanity project, this is what they hope to do -- as well as generate public interest and emotional investment in the research.